


Panglossian

by Lafeae



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Angst, Drabble, Hurt No Comfort, Introspection, M/M, One-Sided Relationship, break-up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-05-13 07:40:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19246780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lafeae/pseuds/Lafeae
Summary: Understanding did not, in any way, equal compassion. Whether anyone thought it was true or not. Their shared past of abuse, their willingness to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and their cheap grovelling at whoever’s knees they landed at long enough to finally pull themselves out of life’s roulette wheel of constant hurt and misery, didn’t make them right or even good for each other. It made them moving targets. And when both parties were willing to shoot the other, it all depended on when.And Seto thought three years was long enough to pretend that he loved Jounouchi Katsuya. To prove it, or to lose it.It took two years and three months.—In which Kaiba and Jounouchi break up.





	Panglossian

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for break up.

It was disingenuous to say that Kaiba Seto disliked love. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been sitting across from Jounouchi Katsuya in a semi-formal dinner. One of their agreed upon date nights, which had been relegated from a well-timed reservation to a simple meal at the estate that started two hours past the time they had originally meant to meet.

Seto ate in silence. Jounouchi’s scorn—he wouldn’t call him Katsuya because he was being so scornful—was more palatable than medium-rare steak and rosemary potatoes. Cooked to perfection, as always, by a chef who didn’t seem as scornful as Jounouchi was to have a late dinner date. Though, if Seto was being honest, he hadn’t asked the cook to make Jounouchi anything special. It was supposed to be living in the little simulation of the high-brow steakhouse that Jounouchi had gotten too comfortable frequenting. Like it was owed to him.

The last thirty minutes had been a clatter of silverware against fine china. Seto took it slow; chewed slow, drank slow, moved slow. It might have been out of tiredness, but that was simply because his body was weary, as always, and everything was slow and deliberate because that was how he liked it. That was the speed he preferred to move at, particularly in his own home. Across from him, Jounouchi sat with an empty plate and an untouched glass of bloody Shiraz, aged five or six years that waited for just the right time to be opened. A dog would snub the finer things for not knowing just how fine they were.

“Drink you wine,” Kaiba said.

Jounouchi ducked his head. Imperceptible, a little curl in his nose. He was rigid and square, his jaw tucking so deep against his neck that it disappeared. Half of his gloomy face smeared with a fleck of au jus that he didn’t bother wiping away.

The quality of Jounouchi that Seto was drawn to had to be his messiness. His disorganisation, his ne’er-do-well, care-free spirit was a thin, gossamer sheet barely concealing the monster teeming beneath his skin. His smiles weren’t enough duct tape to hide just how broken and dangerous he was beneath the surface. When Seto first acquainted himself with Jounouchi at fifteen, he knew that. It was perceptibly obvious just how damaged and misshapen Jounouchi was by the myriad of proud and motley bruises he sported day-in, day-out like a badge of honour and respect. Brutes didn’t deserve respect. That Jounouchi aged out of most of his shallow, antagonistic behaviour hadn’t necessarily been the reason that Seto was more willing to see him, or see eye to eye with him. He still liked Jounouchi’s damage. He just didn’t want to be stabbed by it.

“Why...so I’m good enough t’ be fucked?”

Kaiba cut of the last bits of steak and ran it through the juice. “Yes.”

Jounouchi smacked the table, open palmed. The china jumped. A vase fell over.

“You’re such a motherfucker, y’know that?” Jounouchi asked. The growl gnarled deep into his voice. Tempestuous and alluring. The kind of tone which signified the start of their nightly escapades. First, a verbal assault which may have resorted to a physical one if they were particularly on edge (his knee still ached from a rather strong blow that Jounouchi delivered “on accident,” he said) before they ended up fucking each other wherever they dropped. No where in the house was sacred except for the bed. It always went untouched, to Jounouchi’s never-ending complaints.

Seto had his reasons.

True commitment, Seto decided after the first or second time with Jounouchi. A bed felt final, and he had to remind himself why he and Jounouchi weren’t ‘final’ or even ‘fine’. At the end of the day, the romance with Jounouchi wasn’t real. It was a product of careful grooming and fake adulation, where they both acquiesced that there was no one better for them than each other. It was a ticking time bomb. And when they gave each other token gifts on holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries it became more because other people expected it of them, not because they wanted to. Seto was fairly certain that he had thrown away the putrid paisley tie that Jounouchi had bought him because cerulean wasn’t a gift. It was colour. And not even one that Seto liked in the sea of shades of blue. Jounouchi would have known that if paid one ounce of attention to anything other than the steps that led up to their drawn-out foreplay.

“Can I finish dinner before you start this?” Seto asked.

The monster reared its head sooner than Seto anticipated. He’d calculated somewhere around three years. That gave them time to properly marinate, commiserate in their shared self-loathing that no one else was better for them than each other; broken pieces searching for the juts and crevices that made them whole.

Understanding did not, in any way, equal compassion. Whether anyone thought it was true or not. Their shared past of abuse, their willingness to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and their cheap grovelling at whoever’s knees they landed at long enough to finally pull themselves out of life’s roulette wheel of constant hurt and misery, didn’t make them right or even good for each other. It made them moving targets. And when both parties were willing to shoot the other, it all depended on when.

And he thought three years was long enough to pretend that he loved Jounouchi Katsuya. To prove it, or to lose it.

It took two years and three months.

“What exactly is it that ya want from me? Am I just here so you can have somethin’ to plant your cock in? I’ll tell ya what, you ain’t the best. You ain’t even fuckin’ close. An’ I let you fuck me all this time,” Jounouchi said.

Seto regarded him like an anomaly. As Jounouchi stood shivering, he questioned if it was rage, sadness, or comprehension of how bad they were relying on each other as life rafts. Had Jounouchi started crying, he planned to look away and smile softly to himself, half-heartedly apologise, and round the table to kiss Jounouchi. Jounouchi would have decked him, and then said his apologies while trying to clean up the bloody nose or mouth or both, all the while Seto tried to shove him away.

And after, they’d slip beneath the lace-knit ends of the tablecloth. Finalise the apology with a quick blow job. Because there was no sorry from the heart quite like a good-natured dick sucking and subsequent orgasm.

“Are you upset?” Kaiba asked.

“The fuck—? What kind of question is that? No, Seto, I ain’t upset. I’m fuckin’ seething over here and you’re acting like I’m just messing up your dinner! Here!” Jounouchi stood and poured the wine on the table between them. The last few flecks of it in Seto’s face before Jounouchi set the glass, upside down, on the table. “Fuck your wine.”

The wine dropped down his cheek and touched the corner of his mouth. Room temperature perfect. He dabbed at it with his middle finger and sucked on it.

“It’s good wine.”

“Fuck you! You can’t even listen to me right now! You hearin’ what I’m telling you? I’m angry. You screw everything up. You...you don’t give a damn if you’re late. You don’t care about me, or what I got to say, or wanna spend time with me. Nothin’ fuckin’ matters to you! I bet Mokuba doesn’t even matter to you.”

The steak knife was white-knuckled. There it was. The kind of stab that Seto had so eagerly anticipated for these twenty-seven months. The point where their impossibly balanced relationship flew too close to the sun and melted their wings. Seto had wanted to stab Jounouchi before being stabbed first, but he had failed.

That wasn’t a surprise.

“Get out of my house.”

“Or what, you’ll kill me?”

The knife was dropped. “Get the fuck out of my house or you’ll find out!”

Jounouchi flung back so hard that the chair fell over and cracked against the wall. “Fine! I’ll leave. Fuckin’ finally, I can stop being your damn arm candy. You’re so fucking miserable that you think you can buy happiness, don’t you? Maybe you can buy the media’s attention, but ya can’t buy love, Seto. I hope the next fuckin’ bimbo takes half as long as me to find that out!” Jounouchi grabbed his coat from the chair, yanking it up from where it had fallen. He kicked the chair away.

A long string of expletives followed Jounouchi down the hallway, up until the door slammed and rung deep into the house.

The last bite of steak was cut up and eaten. The quiet hadn’t changed once Jounouchi left, except he didn’t have to listen to how unevenly Jounouchi breathed to try and demand attention. How annoying. The bleach-blond thought he was arm candy. Not even. He’d been a means to an end; Jounouchi’s presence had made Seto a media prince for a while when he came out of the closet as bisexual. Not gay yet. That was too forward for him. But bisexual was appealing to everyone, and it at least gave him some credibility in a market saturated with the want for equal rights.

The knife and fork dropped again.

Seto clamped his hand over his mouth. Deep down, something in him shuddered. Pathetic sobs wracked him from head to toe. Tears welled deep as he realised just how utterly empty everything became. That tomorrow morning he would have to manage to get up and tell his public relations team to fight any and all slander or libel that Jounouchi Katsuya was going to smear about him in hopes of gaining the high ground. The physical pain was one thing; he could manage scars and aches and bruises, he always had. He’d been shot full of holes so young that he didn’t try and fill them in. The emotional turmoil that surfaced itself just moments after the door slammed closed, however, he couldn’t deal with.

Because it was disingenuous to think that Kaiba Seto didn’t want love.

“Nii-sama?” Mokuba whispered, appearing from behind a corner.

Seto’s eyes remained closed. The salt burned at his pores and mixed with the wine to make some off-coloured, all new taste that entered his mouth without his permission. Salty and smokey.

The other hand clamped over his mouth as another body-wracking sob wheezed through him. No one was allowed to hear it. It still slipped out, muffled and beaten, like a dog mewling. At some point, he had been kicked in the gut and he didn’t know when.

Fashioning his relationship with Jounouchi had been purely out of self-gain. At first. The plighted masses liked it when big figures were like they were. Oppressed for their sexuality was the newest card, and Gozaburo had beaten all the shady psychological marketing tactics into him. It was just good business, and it had been a better option than finally being open about his own abuse, because it seemed easier to come out as homosexual (bisexual, but it was all a community thing) than it was to admit he’d been abused. He wanted celebration, not pity.

The money hadn’t made him happy.

Jounouchi had, sometimes. The concept of the love he and Jounouchi had made him happy. Like he finally understood the spoon-fed concept that true love was true happiness. He could fake that. Along the way, it had almost become real, too, when he kissed Jounouchi chastely. When they sat together and held hands. When Jounouchi whispered something in his ear so softly that Seto didn’t hear it, but the what didn’t matter so much as the how.

Seto’s hands fell to the table.

“What happened?” Mokuba asked.

“He left.”

“Oh.”

Mokuba squeezed his brother’s shoulder, and Seto leaned close to the touch. The hiccuped sobs still plagued his chest. Failure stung. Rejection hurt. Lovelessness stabbed him hilt deep and turned. What kind of love did he want, or need, that he couldn’t find?

**Author's Note:**

> Yup. Was in a negative mood, I suppose, and was exploring this darker facet of them. Just a curiosity. I understand it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but tell me what you think. 
> 
> Thank you for reading.


End file.
